I’d posted in the discord about it and it just seems to be an oddity in my system performance. The issue is for two or three mono nodes I’m fine 50-60s on my fps, no real laggy feeling. Then invariably my computer starts dropping and revving back up. It’ll drop to 8-10 fps for like three seconds, then jumps up to 50s-60s. repeat. Here’s the odd part. If I tab over to discord or out of the game to something else like another program and read or do something else for about a minute or so when I go back to LE the glitch is gone. Back to just 50-60s. I can replicate this happening almost 100%.
Here are the support files requested. As well as a zip file with three screen caps of my graphics settings. It’s probably in the log files but I thought I’d be safe and cover all grounds.
So it looks like you are running Windows 10 19043 build on an Apple Mac Pro (Laptop?) assuming via bootcamp… Intel(R) Xeon(R) W-2150B and a Pro Vega 64 (FirePro) 24GB ram (plus shared) … 128GB system ram…
A serious spec that probably cost an arm and a leg but not really designed for gaming or Windows for that matter… and its unlikely that the components are even being used by the game - all the extra memory/cpu cores/gpu ram…
Not sure where to start with some observations so I am just going to list what I found:
There is a Windows Update to 19044 - its unlikely that this is involved but considering Windows Update issues, its worth mentioning… No idea how this could potentially be related to the Apple hardware…
Your system is trying to use a default Microsoft Display Adapter - but its driver is from 2006 and is reporting “graphics device driver error code 31” (you can google how to approach fixing it). I am not sure if this has something to do with bootcamp or how Windows is interpretting the apple hardware but I would definitely suggest you check under Device Drivers in settings and see if you can upgrade this and make sure its actually working properly… I am not sure how it works on Apple laptops, but windows laptops get their knickers in a knot of they have multiple GPU drivers installed and this is known to cause problems with gaming when laptops try and juggle gpu drivers to suit whatever apps are running.
Your Radeon Pro Vega 64 GPU driver is from 11/10/2021 - its pretty old now and I would usually recommend that people dont use a GPU driver older than 3 months - especially if they may be having graphic related errors… WARNING: You mentioned you do video editing etc… Changing driver versions can have an inpact on editing applications and usually you need to match apps with the approved drivers… If this could potentially affect your “day job” then its important to double check… if its not an issue then I would recommend upgrading… My concern is also that commerical gpus like this are also not usually intended to be used for games and can sometimes perform less or use drivers that are not optimised for games vs being optimised for video editing, CAD, 3d rendering etc… Not 100% sure, but if my googling is correct, then this may also be a mobile GPU? if it is, then that adds another level of “not designed for gaming” in the mix…
The dxdiag is showing that you have Razer Core X Chroma drivers installed - from what I can tell via google, this is an external GPU device enclosure connecting via Thunderbolt… Are you using the Pro Vega 64 via this eGPU? There was someone about 18months ago who used one and couldnt get LE to work without lots of instability and very odd issues that we couldnt figure out - not using it was far more stable for them even with using a slower internal gpu instead. Not sure how you are using it directly, but it could most definitely be involved here - even if you are not using it, perhaps whatever drivers it needs are still involved… From the look of it, the drivers are also fairly old.
Your in-game settings look ok… I would switch Antialiasing & Bloom off just to chose the lowest possible option…
Your player log is showing some things that could be related to the issue…
There are lots of very specific and abnormal (at least compared to other players logs) graphical rendering errors… for example, there are almost 400 Unity post processing submesh errors and Shader Unsupported errors that again, I have not seen in other logs. Based on your description of the issue, maybe when these errors happen you get 8fps and then correct when you alt-tab?
There are graphical errors that are usually associated with performance issues - i.e. they appear in logs if the game is struggling to process things at the settings used. These are usually things like Particle system errors. Considering the settings you are using you shouldnt really be having them … perhaps there is some sort of driver issue somewhere…
It seems like the game is taking a few 100ms longer to unload unused memory than what I am used to seeing in logs… usually the total reported is 1400-1700ms but I found at least 8 instances where it took over 2seconds to unload memory in your log … My log for instance doesnt have any unloads that take longer than 1.7seconds… The game doesnt do these unloads while in maps so it shouldnt affect the fps, but I did notice that its taking longer in your logs… Maybe this is just a factor of the amount of ram you have in your system… No idea if its involved - devs are the only ones who would. no idea what could be done if it is involved.
There are a few debug messages that may indicate your install needs to be checked… Normally these dont affect fps like you have described, but I would run the Steam Game file verification, just to be sure… it doesnt take long.
Other potential things:
do you notice the 8fps on specific maps?
Using specific skills or specific unique items?
Are you running any other apps while playing LE? Doesnt matter how irrelevant… Have you tried to play without them running? Sometimes other apps can do strange things E.g. using the discord app while playing CoD causes bizzare fps issues even Steam downloading games/updates in background can nail a CPU…
You said you were monitoring your system… are you noticing anything when it happens? I.e. are you having temperature issues? Does it sound like the fans are lifting off like a boeing?
Have you looked in your View Reliabiliy History on Windows to see if anything is being logged as problematic by Windows?
Thats what I can see from the logs and info you provided… Its most definitely not a normal setup and you are running Windows on a Mac so I have no idea if anything involved in that could be causing issues or if Windows is using the Apple hardware correctly…
Dude, you’re a legend. I’m gonna try all of this, see what I can make of it.
Yeah, I know I’m on a mac running windows. I was one of those ‘mac’ gamers who got the game because…well, you know the story. I don’t play a whole lot of video games, maybe like 3 or 4 and buying a separate machine just for that isn’t cost effective for me. I’d quit gaming instead because I do it to unwind and relax and find something else, so this is what I’ve got.
And I am fully aware it may be suboptimal, which is why I generally don’t shriek about the ‘optimization’ stuff that a lot of other folks like to jump on.
I’ll let you know how these ideas you gave go. The driver one from 2006 looks very promising so that’ll be first.
Now how the heck do I buy you a cup of coffee or a glass of whiskey for taking the time on this?
Note: When I’m in my ‘Windows 10’ I don’t use the eGPU. That’s only for my Mac side. It’s a known issue that Bootcamp doesn’t see the Lightning drives for Windows with eGPUs.
I could not get the Radeon Pro drivers to update for some reason. I downloaded the most recent ones (early June 2022) from the Radeon site but it says it isn’t seeing the device even though Windows clearly is. It’s strange because if I open the Radeon Pro software it says everything is up-to-date. This could well be the mac/windows thing.
So instead I disabled the really old MS Basic Display Adapter.
Seems to have done something positive.
I no longer get the fluctuation much. Well, it still does it when I open up vendors or stash but as soon as I close it jumps right back up to a steady 60.
I had to turn on vertical sync because I was getting tearing.
I think maybe it was getting confused trying to use both drivers at the same time and disabling the one now allows the other to fully function?
I’ll keep playing and see what it does over the next few days.
Windows on Mac - no problem, its just “different” setup that is sometimes really hard to troubleshoot…
Coffee… dont worry about it… My advice may amount to nothing but guesswork and hot air…
eGPU ok… Perhaps you can disable it on the Windows setup - just to stop it trying to load the drivers etc.
Radeon not updating… This is something I was worried about as Windows is probably struggling to directly figure out what the hardware actually is… Some of the errors in your log could be driver related - i.e. like the shader ones - where the game is trying to find this info from the gpu driver but something isnt installed right or missing because the driver installation couldnt figure out what it needed to install… This is something you should probably try to figure out and resolve.
Disabling the Basic Display adapter… Ok… Disabling unused drivers etc can help… Especially if the system is struggling to figure out what to do with them… Especially on laptops - even normal windows laptops with an iGPU in the CPU and a discreet GPU - windows and the laptop bios/secret sauce keeps trying to juggle between the two and it causes no end of hassles with games until you force windows to stop messing around and play the game on one gpu only… It may be that you are having somehting similar… You could go into Windows advanced display settings and force it to only use your Radeon for LE…
Vendor / Stash… these are known fps problems - If I open my stash or inventory with a lot of single 1x1 items, it can affect fps (and GPU usage will spike)… Less items has a direct impact on the issue severity… this used to be much worst a few patches ago - am hoping the 0.9 will improve on this further…
Vertical Sync tearing - yes… this is unfortunately something that can happen… LE doesnt seem to like vsync that much - seems like the fps limit is better at preventing LE from going cookcoo but there isnt usually another solution for the tearing… You could try fiddling with the refresh rates / fps at a driver level to see if it helps…
Maybe just disabling the driver will help… who knows… see how it goes…
